Books

On Beauty and Being Just by Elaine Scarry

Peter Benson applauds a beautiful book on beauty by Elaine Scarry.

In 1998, Elaine Scarry, a professor of aesthetics at Harvard University, was invited to give the prestigious
Tanner Lectures on Human Values. (Previous lecturers have included Michel Foucault and John Rawls.) This
short, incisive, intelligent book is based on her lectures.

She chose as her topic beauty, well aware that it is an unfashionable subject to discuss. “Over
the last several decades,” she notes, “many people have either actively advocated a taboo
on beauty or passively omitted it from their vocabulary, even when thinking and writing about beautiful
objects such as paintings and poems.” These remarks apply particularly to the world of American
academia in which she works, but the situation in Britain is not greatly different.

Recently, the Tate Gallery in London held an exhibition of Victorian paintings of the nude. Both the
catalogue for the exhibition, and the explanatory captions in the gallery, discussed in great detail
the moral views of the Victorians towards the depiction of naked figures. These comments undoubtedly
provided an interesting sociological survey of Victorian attitudes towards sexuality, and towards women,
but there was almost no reference to the aesthetic quality of the exhibits, which ranged from the superb
(exquisite paintings by Burne-Jones) to the trivial (pornographic postcards displayed for our curiosity
in glass cases). Academic discussion of art today seems reluctant to venture any opinion at all about
the beauty of the works on display, even when the creation of beauty was clearly the artist’s primary
intention.

As this example shows, and as Scarry is aware, much of this suspicion of beauty has resulted from
feminist analyses, troubled by the social implications of the male gaze at female loveliness. These feminist
theories were first developed in detail through analysing films. The representative example of the ‘male
gaze’ was taken to be Norman Bates in Hitchcock’s Psycho, peering through a spy-hole
at Janet Leigh in the shower, shortly before murdering her.

Elaine Scarry intervenes into this field of discussion to suggest that we attend, instead, to an equally
emblematic scene: the poet Dante gazing at his beloved Beatrice, and the way he describes this experience
in La Vita Nuova. The effect of her beauty is to render the poet stunned, incapacitated by love,
humbled and joyful. If this gaze of his is a relation of power, then it is surely Dante who is subservient
and Beatrice who is exalted.

Dante is an extreme case, but, Scarry suggests, his eloquent words are an accurate acknowledgement
of the power and effect that beauty can have; not just the beauty of women, but of paintings, poems,
pebbles, skies and mountains. Beauty makes us pause and catch our breath in a moment of suspended delight.
It causes, in Scarry’s words, a ‘radical decentring’. We no longer feel that we ourselves
are at the centre of the world, “we willingly cede our ground to the thing that stands before us.”

When evoking these effects of beauty, whether in the natural world or in the paintings of Matisse,
Scarry’s prose, always precise, is often poetic. She describes, for example, how “a willow
tree, unleafed by winter, becomes electric”. It is rare to find such good writing in a book of
philosophy, and yet philosophy’s need for precision is close to that attentiveness to the particularity
of things which is a necessary part of literary beauty. It would certainly be impossible for the beauty
of Scarry’s prose to detract from its philosophical significance.

Similarly, she argues, beauty cannot possibly lessen our awareness of philosophical and moral questions.
Hence she convincingly debunks the view that “beauty, by preoccupying our attention, distracts
attention from wrong social arrangements”. This political (and ‘politically correct’)
view is the second source, alongside the feminist arguments, for the neglect of beauty in academic discourse
today. The focus of contemporary discussion is instead on the social, historical and economic contexts
of artistic production. The result of this has been a massive impoverishment of language and response.
These approaches to the arts, communicated to a whole generation of students, have saddened Scarry when
she reads their dispiriting effect in the essays of her own students.

In my view, she is wholly successful in her aim of absolving beauty from blame, in freeing it from
the moral condemnation it has received, and restoring it to philosophical attention. In the course of
this process she engages eloquently with earlier thinkers, suggesting ways their views could be modified
for our own more sceptical age. Plato, for example, describes in his Symposium how the perception
of physical beauty provokes a yearning for higher forms of moral beauty until, step by step, the devotee
is led to an awareness of beauty in itself, freed from all contingency.

Few of us today would confidently believe in such a metaphysical entity as ‘beauty in itself’.
Nevertheless, Scarry takes up the Platonic thesis that perceiving an object of beauty leads us to seek
out other beautiful things and also to create new beautiful objects (by painting or writing poems about
the beauty of the world). In this way beauty replicates itself, with our help, somewhat in the same fashion
as Richard Dawkins’ ‘memes’. The Platonic hierarchy of levels of the Beautiful can
be replaced by a network of equal, particular, instances of beauty, calling to each other, leading us
from each to each.

This displacement of a hierarchical view by an emphasis on equality (the equal worth of each beautiful
thing) becomes important in the second half of Scarry’s book. Here, she is not content solely to
secure a moral neutrality for beauty; instead, she wishes to argue that beauty has a positive moral value
and that it actually intensifies our desire to repair injustice wherever we find it. Here her arguments
are much less convincing. Indeed, she is performing the same process as the writers and academics she
has criticized, for she, too, is judging beauty on moral grounds, and therefore implicitly placing moral
values higher than aesthetic values.

I am not suggesting that this hierarchy should be reversed and that the realm of aesthetics should
be considered more important than that of morality. I’m suggesting rather that the two sets of
values are strictly incomparable, and occupy separate spheres. To affirm the importance of beauty is
to declare beauty to be a value in itself and not in need of further validation by reference to some
other value. It should not be considered of value because it leads to justice or goodness, for
such an argument would already implicitly deny its status as a value in itself.

In his Critique of Judgement (1790) Kant suggested that beauty can be regarded as a symbol
of the Good. But he is careful to emphasize that this analogy between the two realms must always remain
aware of the aspects in which they differ, just as much as the aspects in which they reveal similarities.
Scarry also discusses the relation between beauty and justice (the relation evoked in her book’s
title) as an analogy, but one which she thinks has the potential power to bring justice into the world
following close on the footsteps of beauty. The notion of justice which she invokes, however, is that
of a liberal academic in 21st century America, and is less universal than she imagines.

She claims, for example, that the experience of beauty inspires in people “the aspiration to
political, social, and economic equality”. She might, however, have considered once again the example
of Dante, whom she so rightly praised for his responsiveness to beauty. In his political treatise, De
Monarchia Dante gave a carefully reasoned argument against political equality, rejecting the very
idea of democracy. It is true that he does not argue this on grounds drawn from aesthetics, but even
in La Vita Nuova he is led progressively away from the idea of equality. Several of the early
poems in this book complain that Beatrice, by ignoring him, is treating him unfairly and hence that her
actions are morally wrong. Such lover’s complaints were already a familiar theme in the poetry
of his time. But Dante comes to realize that he should not write in this way. His role, as poet and lover,
should be simply to praise Beatrice, and not to seek equality in their relationship. This recognition
is one of the central moral turning points of his book (and of his life) and it also results in an increase
in the aesthetic quality of his verse.

It is thus through his devotion to beauty that Dante is led away from any desire for equality.

Beauty is not democratic. It is distributed unequally among people. And those who can create it (in
poems or paintings) are a valued minority; a favoured elite.

Scarry places emphasis on the symmetry often found in a beautiful face or piece of music, and seeks
to connect this with John Rawls’ definition of justice as “a symmetry of everyone’s
relations to each other”. It would be equally possible to argue, following a different set of analogies,
that beauty can teach us the value of hierarchy. For not only is there an evident hierarchy among beautiful
things, but the organization of material in a well-constructed painting or novel is hierarchical (central
subject, subsidiary elements, framing structure).

Arguments from analogy always allow this leeway. They are dependent on the specific features chosen,
the particular connections made. Over time the moral and political aspirations of society change. Our
own notions of justice today differ from those of Dante. (Who today could feel complaisant satisfaction
at the punishments meted out in his Inferno?)

Though his poetry does not express our beliefs, its beauty (of language and imagery) remains available
to us. Beauty endures, though moral values change. Art and the practice of aesthetic appreciation allow
the temporary suspension of moral judgement, and the consequent ability to give beauty its due regard.
The politicization of discussions about art in recent years has made this process increasingly difficult.
Standing before a painting today, students are encouraged to consider the economic conditions that allowed
the patron to commission it, and the psychological conflicts which the painter may have embodied in it.
Such topics are easy to assimilate to a view of teaching as the communication of facts, but the painting
should also communicate something quite different: an alive responsiveness to the world, a delight in
light and in the quick flicker of leaves on the trees – a cleansing of vision which allows the
world outside the gallery to be seen more clearly.

Scarry hopes to revive our sense of the importance of this experience. However, by choosing to defend
beauty on moral grounds she returns us to those same embroiled political arguments which have for so
long distracted us from beauty’s brightness. One could easily disagree with her Rawlsian view of
justice without disputing her perceptive aesthetic judgements on Matisse. There is no necessary connection
between the two, or between beauty and justice. She has, however, revived a debate (with Plato, Dante,
Kant and others) which has remained silent far too long. The place of beauty in our lives, and hence
the future course of our civilization, will depend on the answers we collectively reach to the questions
raised in this important book.

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